I have been home several days from Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009 now and have been spending those days trying to catch up on real life. I have just been sorting through the paper I accumulated while at the Expo.

Of course, I now can’t find the printed schedule for the third day of the Expo—oh well, you can all see what occurred here:

This report will cover Thursday April 2, 2009. And this installment covers only what I was able to sample of the many sessions on offer. There were so many sessions that looked fascinating that picking and choosing among them was often a painful process.

Interestingly, the keynotes were often the weakest part of each day’s offerings.

For instance, I found “How the Web Ate the Economy, and Why This Is Good for Everyone” talk by Douglas Rushkoff just plain goofy. His notions that people were healthier and better off in the Middle Ages (try living in a world where life expectancies were infinitesimal compared to today and I do not imagine that life as peasant on a feudal estate was all that swell) and that monetary systems are really just a anachronistic bother and that we should return to the oh so efficient life of bartering and haggling were just plain bizarre. It is regrettably the case that at tech conferences the big name speakers are the least interesting people. Sweeping statements that genuine historians would find ludicrous are a swallowed by the gullible techie crowd.

The presentation “Year of the Mobile Computer: Mobile Computers as Personal (Mobile) Computers” by Anssi Vanjoki of Nokia was considerably better. Like many of the speakers at the conference, he maintained that mobile is the future of search and computing in general and played a video of a young woman converting her mobile phone into a wearable wristband and so forth. Vanjoki had such a stentorian delivery that he conveyed a sense not of excitement but of menace. A sort of, “Dis ist the future—you VILL like it.”

Then we are all supposed to be mightily impressed by “A Conversation with Ellen Miller” of the Sunlight Foundation, the aim of which is to harness, “…the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency.” Web 2.0 guru Tim O’Reilly conducted the interview and though he has an endearing, unassuming manner and I did find his, “This is important, folks” pronouncements a bit grating–as if we poor slobs in the audience needed to be tutored in what societal developments are significant. Miller herself struck me as self-important and self-aggrandizing and seemed blithely unaware that groups such as Common Cause and the League of Women Voters have been slogging away for good government for decades. I love Web 2.0 and all things tech. But sometimes the arrogance of its proponents really is insufferable. “We are new! We are cool! Nobody has fought for truth and justice before! It’s all the Web now!” Yeah, right.

To be honest, I found the first two presentations so tedious that I didn’t get much out the technical presentation by Kevin Lynch of Adobe Systems Incorporated, although I did prefer his manner—straightforward as opposed to the smugness sand swaggering of the previous speakers. And those deep into gaming would have found utterly absorbing the interview with gaming giant Will Wright. Not being a fifteen year-old geek or a vendor catering to that demographic, I did not find it so. But he certainly came across as modest, likable and thoughtful. I wish that they addressed the potential of Spore in engendering interest in young people in evolutionary biology. There is something genuinely valuable in that for science education.

We were then all released to spend the rest of the day at what is actually valuable at the Web 2.0 Expo: the individual sessions and the chance to roam the exhibit hall and chat with vendors at the booths, to try out their software and gather up business cards and brochures. I learned at lot by doing all that every day and was absolutely spent at the end of each day by seeing and learning so much and trying to write it all up.

I am very, very glad to have been given the chance to go to this conference. Web 2.0 for all its hype really is a revolution in human communication and information exchange and it was only at this conference that I have known the pleasure of being able to almost literally grab a developer of a computer voice-activation system and introduce him to a staffer of the National Institutes of Health and say, “Here—you guys need to talk…” Such interactions really could help those with neuromuscular disorders. So thank you, Tim O’Reilly for effecting such changes and accelerating the pace of progress for so many in some many ways. Web 2.0 really does empower people. I am an insignificant person, but at this conference I really did feel that in the world of Web 2.0 good ideas and innovative technologies can find their way in the world and make a difference.

It is for that reason that I wish there had been a much larger presence of people from the world of libraries of all kinds, education at all levels, healthcare and science. I know that we in medical libraries and high school and community college education and Science 2.0 all have our own conferences and social networks. But there were many exhibitors that were showcasing systems that could be adopted by universities or high school teachers that they may not know about.

For instance, anyone from community college instructors to nonprofit staffers to churches and community groups and clubs should take a look at the services of the open source enterprise collaboration and community platform MindTouch Deki

And for those who lack the time to master the intricacies of Web site development and lack the wherewithal to pay a professional to make site for you and simply need a simple but serviceable Web site, check out the incredibly easy to use Yola.

Copy and paste. Drag and drop. Bang. Website. Pretty slick. As they say, sweeeeeeet. A lot of this stuff I have not seen at library conferences, for instance, but many of the vendors at Web Expo had products that could be deployed in many educational and library settings and in government at all levels. Increasingly consumers expect rich Web services and there were services galore displayed in the exhibit hall. And need to cut back on business travel and want leverage the power of online video conferencing? Check out ooVoo

Getting back to the sessions proper. I attended the session, “Visualizing a Web of Data.” That was a low-key presentation somewhat akin to the much more dynamic keynote of Friday April 3 Designing for Big Data by Jeff Veen of Small Batch, Inc. Both presentations were exceedingly valuable for illuminating for those of us who are not specialists in the field how data can be powerfully presented on the Web and the imperative need to avoid engaging in the self-indulgent production of useless glitz. I thought of my friends in the world of Science 2.0 blogging and wish they had been there as additional speakers. Goodness knows they deal in such matters intensively.

I next attended the edifying but unspectacular presentation The “Mobile First” User Experience Marc Davis (Yahoo! Inc.). Solid overview of the rise of cell phones and similar devices as the gateway to the Internet for many (particular in the developing world). It was a given at the conference that mobile devices will become the way most people access the Internet. Desktops were decreed as good as dead by many of the speakers (if they bothered to acknowledge the existence of desktops at all). I don’t buy that. You just can’t do serious, in-depth searches on a mobile device. Get real. Yes, you can pull out your cell phone so as to one up someone with a quick trip to Wikipedia and call up a crucial file and someday will be able to point your mobile device at the Great Pyramid and download data on its height and age, etc. But people will always have desks and the need to spread stuff out on them (or in my case, on the floor beneath it).

The session “Sources for Data Geeks: A Detective Story” by Toby Segaran (Metaweb) was quite disappointing. I was expecting something of real substance, something that, say, might have been of interest to a Science 2.0 blogger or to a science librarian. But alas, this was a workshop for average Joes with Web sites and looking for free stuff to offer visitors. Nothing in this workshop that you couldn’t have picked up in a chat with your friendly public library reference desk librarian. Way too rudimentary for this level of a conference.

A major strength of the Web 2.0 Expo are the Birds of Feather sessions. I had attended the one on healthcare, HealthCamp: The Call to Action for Innovation in Health Care which discussed HealthCamp and the opportunities for networking and tracking and for working for change in the healthcare sector via that movement and the next day got real insights into the gloom and doom for newspapers in the session, FinancialContent: Newspaper Industry Survival Guide and Opportunities for Web 2.0 Businesses. Not too many upbeat scenarios for the print media in the Web 2.0 world.

I have already discussed at length how inspirational and thought-provoking the session Peek Into a Secret Society of Entrepreneurs led by Larry Chiang was. The Web 2.0 Expo really does offer outstanding opportunities to meet people with good ideas and promising technologies.

I got a lot out of every day at the conference and found amidst the debris of our current economic troubles that there is hope given how many bright people there are in tech and was filled with admiration for the intrepid investors willing to back them.